tense-marking by affixes on both non-predicate and predicate NPs and pronouns

[claude-hagege]

Dear LingTyp members,
   Since Roland Hemmauer has already sent a summary, it might be to late to add something to this discussion, but I would like to point out that tense(not aspect, mood, etc.)-marking by affixes (not clitics) on both non-predicate and predicate NPs and pronouns is a fairly widespread phenomenon all over the world. The case of Guarani is well-described in several monographs and articles. The same phenomenon is found in many Amerindian languages, both in North- and South-America, besides Yukaghir, Samoyed and other languages already mentioned by Elena and Florian. I should add that in Hausa and other Chadic languages, tense-marking on pronouns is quite regular. Let me quote an illustration from Comox, in which, like in other Salishan languages, this a very frequent phenomenon: not only can non-predicate NPs be tensed, like tala "money" (from dollar, incidentally), in tala-elh (money-PAST) used as subject or object of a verb, but tensed non-verbal predicates are common, as in

hégos-elh té'e (chief-PAST) this "this man was the chief".
 More data in C. Hagège, Le comox lhaamen de Colombie britannique, présentation d'une langue amérindienne, Amérindia, Paris, Association d'Ethnolinguistique Amérindienne, 1981, and in "Du concept à la fonction en linguistique, ou la polarité vebo-nominale", La Linguistique,vol. 20, 2, 1984, 15-28.

Best regards to all,
Claude.

Claude Hagège, Chaire de Théorie Linguistique, Collège de France, Paris.



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